Baking bread: where to get flour

What are you buying and what kind of bread do you want to make. The equivalent of what I call strong plain flour is hiivaleipäjauho. That has the right protein content for a plain white loaf. You can also experiment by mixing flours and using other grains such as spelt.

The supermarkets sell a huge variety of different flours including organic flour. Some speciality flours can be found in places like Ruohonjuuri. You can also buy flour and grains direct from producers through the REKO food circles: http://luomulaakso.fi/luomu-ja-ekolinki ... arenkaita/

chiddick wrote:Hi,where to get good bread flour in Helsinki? I have tried baking with everything I can find in normal supermarkets and it's rarely successful. Excellent flour for cakes doesn't work for light bread.

Does anyone know?

thanks,Jonathan

That surprises me as I bake both white as well as sourdough bread at home, and I only use the normal supermarket flour. I am aware that the flour quality heavily influences the end result, but the standard ones from the supermarket always fullfilled my needs.

Hi,I have tried many different flour varieties, all the ones that you find on the normal supermarket shelves in my quest to make Brötchen like the baker turns out in Germany. The results have been very variable. I'm going to a very light and soft crumb and extremely crispy crust. I have the equipment to do this as I am using a combi-steam oven so can control the temperature and humidity very easily but the crumb has always turned out too heavy. These standard flours seem to be much more suitaed to cakes and pulla than for bread.

Yesterday evening I bought a bag of flour from Heinontukku which looked promising and have just tried it. It is by far the best yet. 14g protein and 4g of fat/100g. It made for a very elastic dough and giving it 25 mins at 50% humidity and then 10 mins at 30% produced a much better result. The crumb is still a bit too heavy but much improved.

It was Sunnuntai Puolikarkea vehnäjauho but the fat content and protein values were higher than the yellow bags you find in retail. this was a plain while 4kg bag with red writing. The best yet but still not quite there. I will certainly check out REKO. Thanks for the tip!